Archive for December, 2011

A while ago I was working on a little tool to manage my media files – TV shows and movies that I’d ripped from my DVD collection that I wanted to make available through XBMC on my home theater system. To display things like plot, characters, runtime, etc., XBMC reads NFO files – which are just XML files – one for each media file. Entering this information by hand is not a fun afternoon activity, so I looked for a way to automate it. I found a couple of different sites that provided the data I needed via APIs and eventually settled on TheTVDB.com for TV series and themoviedb.org for movies. So all I needed to do was read the data using the APIs and write it to the NFO files. Simple!

For each TV series, TheTVDB provides a ZIP file containing several XML files which splits up the information to make it more manageable and allows for easier internationalization. A typical ZIP from TheTVDB contains files such as actors.xml, banners.xml, and en.xml. The actors.xml file contains a list of actors, the roles they play, a link to an image, etc.. banners.xml provides links to fan art and thumbnails which XBMC can use for display. en.xml provides the core data: a description of the TV series and a list of all the episodes from the series including plot, runtime, air date, etc. for each of them.